Objection 1. It would seem that a man ought not to be debarred from receiving Orders on account of a lack of members. For one who is afflicted should not receive additional affliction. Therefore a man ought not to be deprived of the degree of Orders on account of his suffering a bodily defect.

Objection 2. Further, integrity of discretion is more necessary for the act of orders than integrity of body. But some can be ordained before the years of discretion. Therefore they can also be ordained though deficient in body.

On the contrary, The like were debarred from the ministry of the Old Law (Leviticus 21:18, seqq.). Much more therefore should they be debarred in the New Law.

We shall speak of bigamy in the treatise on Matrimony (66).

I answer that, As appears from what we have said above (3,4,5), a man is disqualified from receiving Orders, either on account of an impediment to the act, or on account of an impediment affecting his personal comeliness. Hence he who suffers from a lack of members is debarred from receiving Orders, if the defect be such as to cause a notable blemish, whereby a man's comeliness is bedimmed (for instance if his nose be cut off) or the exercise of his Order imperiled; otherwise he is not debarred. This integrity, however, is necessary for the lawfulness and not for the validity of the sacrament.

This suffices for the Replies to the Objections.

I don't pretend to be a Canon Lawyer (IANACL). If you are a canon lawyer, or a suitable imitation thereof, please weigh in below. And let me make this obvious, in case any non-medievalists wander in: I'm not raising these questions as someone hostile to Catholicism. I'm not trying to dislodge the newly minted Francis. I'm just a humble medievalist.

In other words, visibility doesn't always work in any obvious way to classify impediments as significant. For still more on issues of visibility and disability, see Greg Carrier here. Also recall last year's précis of Maaike van der Lugt's "L'humanité des monstres et leur accès aux sacrements dans la pensée médiévale" [The humanity of monsters and their access to the sacraments in medieval thought], here, where I summarize her summary of some thirteenth-century quodlibetal material:

And then, finally, we have the problem of intersexed people. The church authorized their marriage, but only if they adopted either a feminine or masculine role, and stuck with it. Those without a preference were to remain chaste. Choosing which gender dominated was a knotty problem: some thinkers emphasized genitals, others secondary sexual characteristics (a beard, for example), and others comportment and behavior. Baptism wasn't a problem here, although in cases of doubt, the priest should give the child a masculine name, which could easily be made feminine if necessary (Robert would become Roberta, Gerald would become Daphne, etc.). Those intersexed people thought to have a dominant masculinity could even be ordained as priests.

We therefore have a kind of muddled field of visibility and invisibility in the notion of the priest's being a proper, bodily representative of Christ on earth. With all due respect to Aquinas, all that's clear to me at the moment is that there's no single authority on whom we can rely.

In short--again, IANACL--because it is an "invisible" disability (though one now made visible perhaps to develop a supercrip narrative, as suggested here), and, furthermore, because Francis, like any priest, could simply obtain a proper dispensation, having only a single lung (or having, say, three lungs) presumably would not be sufficient to bar a man from the Papacy.

I'm inviting further discussion below, from people who actually know things about disability studies, canon law, and the complicated (and still very hot) issues surrounding the notion of the priest as representing Christ.

3 comments:

As I understand it, and not being a Church lawyer either, as long as the RIGHT hand is not damaged, so as to mar the blessings, there can be activity as a priest. However, should there be a finger, or portion thereof, missing from the RIGHT hand, the blessings would not be given with a hale and healthy member and thus would be invalid.

Really great post Karl. Thinking through this, I wonder how the choice of the name "Francis" might also be significant here (St Francis of Assisi having gone blind in later life). It was during this period of his ministry that "the Canticle of the Sun" is attributed to be written by him.

This song, containing an affirmation of the (inconstant) material universe as familial, contains the stanza:

Some of these understandings may be, as Aquinas suggests, an impairment that may be endured or excused, but thinking through Francis, we might read this rather as an affirmation of "sustaining", "claiming", and "insisting" on our inconstant embodiments as a part of that "amour."

That's just one alternative reading, and answers Canon Law with poetry instead.

(It might also be worth noting that, while still a highly regarded document, Aquinas himself abandoned the Summa Theologica, regarding it as a kind of failure/a task beyond his skill to rule).

slightly lazy comment but yes, incarnational theologies have implications and allow doors to open. like queer and feminist theologies. important point is to differentiate historical person of Jesus from the Christ, who might be embodied in any way that we see any human embodied. made in God's image, all, is the point.http://arl-jrl.org/Volumes/Sprinkle09.pdf